Posts Tagged ‘Coop’

I put on my pants one leg at a time just like everyone else in the morning. Except then I just have really great ideas for games. [pats self on back]

This game is Viscera Cleanup Detail, it’s a first person spaceship janitor simulator and it’s my absolute favourite game. People (like Sponge) will tell you that the idea was used ‘before’ or something in a game called Space Station 13 but since I haven’t played that and don’t know anything about it let’s just pretend that the idea came entirely from me. Read the rest of this entry »

There has already been a short trailer showing the chip-fipping, face-slamming action of the Syndicate reboot, this being the boot that may stamp on the face of your gaming past forever. This longer video shows an actual play session on the same map, jumping between agents’ viewpoints to confuse me but otherwise giving a fairly good idea of how things will play out. There will be lots of violence, death and use of cover. Strategy? Well, you’ll have to wait for team-mates before opening certain doors and really tough men will absorb thousands of bullets so you’ll need to heal one another during those fights. Oh, just look at it.

After the recent tragic events in Norway, of course various media outlets and officials looked to find a connection between the shootings by Anders Behring Breivik and computer games. (After the same groups had sought to find a connection between the shootings and Islamic groups, as well.) It’s normal practise, as what was once a confusion over new media has now reached the far more insidious position of being a received opinion: that videogames cause people to become violent, and in extreme cases, inspire them to go on murder sprees. It’s important to realise, this has never been demonstrated, let alone proven. Studies come and go that suggest links between extensive sessions of playing violent games and minor changes in the brain, but none has ever shown any demonstrable causal link to real-world violence, and many have suggested no such link exists. In the end such attempts to create links between a tragedy and the perpetrator’s having played games end up becoming tasteless attempts to score aimless political points. Sadly, in reaction to the news in Norway, a number of Norwegian shops are no longer selling a range of first-person shooters. I want to explore this, and argue why this is actually a very dangerous response.